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LUG Meetings

Meet up with Montana Linux people on IRC. We currently gather at the #ubuntu-montana room on the freenode network. Stop in and say "hello" or even ask/answer some questions. Don't have to be a Ubuntu user either. Or use the web-based chat client.

BillingsLUG
The BillingsLUG hasn't had a meeting in a while but they are hoping to start back up real soon. Really.

BozemanLUG
The BozemanLUG meets on the FIRST Thursday of the month at 7PM

MSU-Bozeman
EPS Building, Rm 259
Bozeman, MT
Used to be the LAST Thursday, but we changed it.

Upcoming events

Cool Gear

Firefox

Fedora 20 updated to the recently released Firefox 30. Are you using it yet? I am.

I just accidentally discovered a feature I didn't even know existed. What feature? I'll call it the Firefox Resolution Tester feature although I'm sure that is NOT the real name of it. I don't know how long it has been a feature of Firefox... maybe for a long time... but like I said... I just found it in Firefox 30. How do you access it? Hit CONTROL-SHIFT-m. That's it.

I accidentally discovered it when I wasn't paying attention to which application window I was using had the focus. I thought it was konsole (KDE GUI terminal). CONTROL-SHIFT-m in konsole toggles the menu on and off. In Firefox it takes the current web page you are viewing and puts a black border around that has a control menu at the top left of that black border. The control menu allows you to pick from several pre-defined resolutions or even add additional presets if desired. Picking a different resolution resizes the view of the page (and increases the black border around it accordingly) to the desired resolution. It also has a screenshot feature (saves to your default download directory and auto-names images something like "Screen Shot 2014-06-01 at 07.42.29.png"). You can also rotate the resolution to simulate a mobile device. It has a "Simulate Touch Event" button but I'm not sure what that does. Anyone?

What good is that feature? Well if you do any web development it should be fairly obvious. While this site doesn't display well at all on smaller screens the current trend is that more and more web traffic is from mobile devices... and there is a push for "responsive design". Haven't heard of "responsive design" yet? It is a combination of CSS and probably some javascript... to make pages resize like magic. Menus move around jumping from horizontal layout to vertical. Images magically resize themselves to fit. It is smooth like butter when it works. Why doesn't this site have a responsive design? Well I'm still using Drupal 4 which was EOLed (end of life) several years ago. I have been testing the Drupal 8 development version and its default and admin themes are responsive. As a result I've been looking around at various websites and responsive themes and wow, they are awesome. Yet again I'll make the claim that I'm going to switch this site over to next Drupal release when it comes out... so I can have all of the new features including responsiveness. Knock on wood.

At work they recently licensed a commercial web content management system that primarily targets larger educational institutions -- OmniUpdate Campus. The web developers (which I am not one) at work have created a nice responsive theme that everyone can use for their departmental websites and it works great. Don't have a responsive site handy? You can try this temporary testing one I made in OmniUpdate. That's just a shell but it'll show you responsiveness.

Anyway, I kind of got off track. Yeah, Firefox. Try CONTROL-SHIFT-m and enjoy. Can anyone tell me what version of Firefox first included this feature?

One of my favorite Firefox extensions I have been using for a year and a half is called Foxmarks. Foxmarks is a bookmark synchronizer that keeps your different Firefox installs all updated with the same set of bookmarks. For me there is nothing more frustrating than not having that one cool link you saved on your computer at home and for the life of me, can't remember how or where I got it to begin with.

I had been a non-conformist in many ways with regard to installing my own tarball of Thunderbird and Firefox instead of using the packaged RPMs Fedora already built. I mainly did this because they are considered stable by Mozilla yet one version ahead of RPMs.

Late last year I had run into problems with my system dieing for various reasons and I had suspected Firefox. I knelt down and installed the RPM leaving the tarball version in place and changing my app links to point to the correct bin. Soon to follow was Thunderbird as well.

My family computer is the second Dell we have had with XP Home for the kids gaming entertainment and dual booting Linux mainly for my doing the books. Under XP we have used open source applications for the most part: Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org. So off to a great start for migration.

Prior to allowing kids to play on the computer my wife had been using Linux with our first Dell. Then she just stuck with XP instead of having to keep rebooting for the kids. They had acquired many educational and gaming CD's over the years.

Okay I said I would do some explaining. I don't want this to get long so I'll try to summarize.

My coworker who does GIS work here is using a workstation formerly used by another former employee. This PC has seen its day I think. All the form boxes in applications and websites are out of proportion and sorta smooshed into other text. I took a stab at figuring out what it was to no avail. Okay that was short and sweet. Then recently a couple apps started popping up the Windows installer every time the Desktop was accessed. Thinking he must have some spyware or virus, I scanned his machine and ultimately uninstalling one of the two troubling apps to work with one at a time popping up. As administrator things seem to work fine after going through the install motions but only for that session and IT has these locked down so that users can't do installs. So in one effort to fix that dang form box monitor resolution issue, I install a different video driver and viola! it is fixed. Install one of the pissy apps and wham it's all crap again.

I have decided to change my favorite color from blue to a burnt orange I like to called chumber. Not sure why I call it that. I suppose because it's sort of an amber look. Actually I like the combination of black and orange with grays. My current favorite Firefox theme is the Orange Shift which displays a great example. Also you could see my main website sandersonline.org and see another subtle usage with the logo and Firefox logo I created.

I think I first noticed I like chumber when I keep looking at cars of this color especially